Family: ”Boyz N the Hood” movie director dies at 51

Popular film director, John Singleton, who directed the famous ‘Boyz N The Hood’ movie is dead at the age of 51 after suffering a stroke after he was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on April 17, due to a history of hypertension, according to his family who’ve decided to take him off life support.

Cuba Gooding Jr.(Tre), Morris Chestnut (Ricky), and Ice Cube (Doughboy was a film about three teenagers growing up amid gang violence in South Central Los Angeles, as they try to avoid gangs and drugs. In the movie, Tre refrains from taking revenge with his half-brother Doughboy after Ricky gets shot by a gang member.

John singleton at young age during Boyz N The hood

Born in January 6, 1968, in Los Angeles, Singleton wrote the screenplay for the film during film school and even after it was out he said he was getting to know how to direct a movie. ” As the movie was going along, I was learning how to direct, ” when questioned about the film 25 years later. ” As it becomes more intense and comes on to the third act, the camerawork is more and more fluid, because I’m getting better and better — and taking more chances.”

“I look at it as a time-capsule of what I was thinking and feeling at the time. I wrote the script when I was 20 years old. I went and saw Do The Right Thing in the summer of 1989, I came of the theater, and I was so enamored of Spike Lee, he was like my cinematic big brother. I’d met him two weeks before I started USC film school, when he came out with She’s Gotta Have It in 1986. I saw him in L.A. He moved people out of the way and he shook my hand. I told him, ‘I’m going to USC in two weeks: watch out for me.’ I went to school for four years repping black cinema. I was one of the only black film-making students in a predominantly white film culture. There was continuing marginalization: ‘Oh, there’s only going to be one Spike Lee,’ and that kind of thing. But I was like, ‘I’m the next John Singleton, I’m not the next Spike Lee.’ My thing was, ‘I’m going to get out of school and be a first-round draft pick, just like in the NBA or NFL, but in film: I’m gonna come hard.’ So the question was how to do that? Coming after Do The Right Thing, something clicked. In any type of writing program, they say to write about what you know. When you’re a certain age you only have a limited amount of life experience. I only knew about what I saw growing up in the hood, so I went and hung out with my folks on Vermont Avenue and decided to figure out this story. That’s where this came from: me trying to make an identity for myself as a filmmaker repping Los Angeles, and using a certain part of L.A. as an identity.”